Blazon: Argent on a triple mount Vert, a lion rampant Or armed and langued Gules and in dexter chief a mullet of six points Or.
SOURCES, NOTES & CREDITS: The Illustration of Archbishop Heim is from the front of the dust jacket of “Heraldry in the Catholic Church” by Bruno B. Heim. The blazon is taken and modified from page 113, of “Or & Argent” by B. B. Heim to reflect the Archbishop’s own arms. The biographic information is from various internet sources such as the Catholic Hierarchy.org. and from the Wikipedia articles. We once were lucky enough to meet and speak with the Archbishop.
Archbishop Bruno Bernard Heim was born on 5 March 1911in Olten, Switzerland. In 1934 Heim was awarded a doctorate in philosophy at the Pontifico Collegio Internazionale in Rome and went on to study theology in Rome at Freiburg University and at Solothurn, Switzerland.
He was ordained a priest in 1938 and worked as a curate in two Swiss parishes. In 1942 he returned to Rome to study at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, later returning to Switzerland. In 1946 he was awarded a doctorate in canon law from the Gregorian University.
anuary 1947, he was assigned to the Apostolic Nunciature in Paris to become personal secretary to Archbishop Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII. Heim stayed in Paris for four years, during which time the two of them laid the foundations for a renaissance of heraldry in the Roman Catholic Church.
Heim was next sent to the Vienna Nunciature in 1951. When he was made Apostolic Delegate to Scandinavia in 1961, he was also consecrated titular archbishop of Xanthus, a defunct see. His consecrator was Bishop Franz von Streng, Bishop of Basel e Lugano and co-consecrator Bishop Johannes Theodor Suhr, Bishop of Copenhagen.
When asked where Xanthus was, Heim would jokingly reply: “Most of it is now in the British Museum”. In 1966 he was appointed Pro-Nuncio to Finland, and in 1969, Pro-Nuncio to Egypt.
In 1973 he became Apostolic Delegate to Great Britain. He was known as a personal friend of the Queen Mother. By the time Pope John Paul II visited Great Britain in 1982, the United Kingdom and the Vatican had established full diplomatic relations, and Archbishop Heim had become the Apostolic Pro-Nuncio, the Vatican’s first fully-fledged ambassador to the Court of St. James’s since the Reformation. When he retired as a diplomat in 1985, The Times referred to him as “tact personified”.
Archbishop Heim was one of the most prominent heraldists of the twentieth century particularly ecclesiastical heraldry. He published five books on heraldry and was responsible for designing the coats of arms of four popes: Pope John XXIII, Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul I and Pope John Paul II.
He was also Grand Prior of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George. The Order had a meeting in Rome in 1995 which is where we met him. Archbishop Heim also served as patron of Cambridge University Heraldic and Genealogical Society from 1980 until his death in 2003 at the age of 92 in Olten, Switzerland.
The artwork is by the Archbishop himself.
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